This Monday, the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo completed the confiscation of the house of the writer Gioconda Belli in Managua. Police officers and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) occupied the building seven months after the poet was stripped of her Nicaraguan nationality along with more than 300 political prisoners, opponents, activists and journalists.
Belli and the rest of the opponents, including the writer Sergio Ramírez, were declared traitors to the country and the dispossession of their nationality came with the confiscation of all their assets. Although the regime had already begun identifying the properties of some of those denationalized, it completed the confiscations little by little.
“I have lost many things but they will not make me lose my dignity. However, I accuse and denounce them for doing, guided by their ambition and vengeful blindness, such a number of evils against the country that I predict the terrible but well-deserved end that the tyrants suffer,” Belli told EL PAÍS. “My house will be filled with ghosts and there will be no being that lives there that can be happy in it,” he added.
Next to Belli’s property, located on Carretera Sur, on a hill that offers a view of Lake Xolotlán, Camilo Castro Belli’s home was also confiscated. He is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and son of the writer. Currently, he is exiled in Costa Rica with his wife, documentary filmmaker Leonor Zuñiga.
Like his mother, de Castro Belli was stripped of his nationality. Belli’s latest film is called Patrol and denounces the plundering of the Indio Maíz Reserve and the extractive livestock industry on indigenous lands whose main market is the United States.
Last July, the regime confiscated a house owned by Sergio Ramírez located in the municipality of Masatepe, where the Luisa Mercado Foundation, which ran the Cervantes Prize, operated.
Confiscations are one of the Ortega-Murillos’ latest repressive methods to silence critical voices. The confiscation of the home of Gonzalo Carrión, a human rights lawyer exiled in Costa Rica, was also known.
Subscribe here to newsletter from EL PAÍS América and receive all the key information on current events in the region
#Ortega #Murillo #confiscate #house #writer #Gioconda #Belli #Managua